dreaming on

"It's not my responsibility to inject my child with chemicals in order for [a child like Maggie] to be supposedly healthy," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, it's very likely that her leukemia is from vaccinations in the first place." - a fucking lunatic

Her leukemia is from vaccinations

Her leukemia is from vaccinations

*SCREAMING FOREVER*

In the article he also said that how dare your dying child expect to have any form of life involving the outside of her bedroom, including interaction with her immediate family (her infant brother got the measles) and seeking healthcare (he got it while at a clinic)? It's unfortunate but she deserves to die if she goes anywhere where a person with an easily preventable illness who may not have any symptoms has been within the past 2 hours, which is the duration of time measles can survive in the air. I need my child to remain "pure" and free of chemicals except all the chemicals in his food and his drinks and on his clothing and in his toothpaste and in his shampoo and sldkfjslkgj I can't

Her leukemia is from vaccinations

I read Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

( Review + weekly resolution stuff under here. )

So, two years late, I finally finished FFXIII. I had about a 40% disapproval rating for the beginning of the game, and about a 75% disapproval rating for the end of the game. It wasn't stellar and for a while I resented it so much that I genuinely reconsidered my plans to get FFXIII-2, and thought about maybe leaving the unpaid-for pre-order sitting in the store.

( Warning: also contains spoilers for Tales of Vesperia and Kingdom Hearts 2, just for kicks. )

Things I'm Not Doing Today:
+ Tags
+ Writing
+ Translating
+ Looking at Plurk
+ Working, Really


Things I'm Doing Today:
+ Planning To Go Home, Lie Horizontally, And Read Cracked.com Articles Out Loud While rainfall Plays Final Fantasy XIII

...Looks good to me! Oh, hey, and

+ Where Is My Damn Bleach Chapter


ETA: Wait! I know. I'm boycotting internet productivity in protest about SOPA/PIPA. I am so trendy and on-topic. You wish you were all as principled as I am.

...Seriously though, that is a serious issue that you should all protest against if you don't know about it.

I've been playing a lot of WoW. And I was reminded of something I love in this game.

One of the quest chains in Storm Peaks involves being disguised as a frost vrykul, a race of warriorlike half-giants who live in Northrend, who are highly, highly matriarchal, women (even enemy women) being well-regarded and respected, and men (even non-vrykul men) being considered worthy only to be slaves. The playable races have to be disguised as frost vrykul women to get by there, but once you do, it's sort of awesome.

A frost vrykul says to you, "Bears are beautiful creatures. Wild, strong, and fierce in battle. Much like us, sister."

I love the different standards of beauty. These women appreciate polar bears the way they think they, themselves, are beautiful. Because they're strong and difficult to control and they can fight.

There are many jokes and flirts that also indicate differing standards of beauty. (I always wince at the dwarf female flirt where she goes "I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW I CAN FLATTEN STEEL WITH MY THIGHS." Honey, that-- that could be bad.) I really like thinking about some of them, although some of them are also a little strange/nonsensical/oh.

But my favorite is definitely "Single Draenei female seeks blacksmith with grinding wheel to take care of me and my gorgeous hooves."

She says it in such a fluffy tone. Her hooves are gorgeous. And she wants a man who can take care of them. I love it.

Female goblins are so cute and I'm in love with some of their lines. "I'm a free spirit. I don't like to be tied down. What? You mean literally? Oh no... totally into that."

/will return to regularly-scheduled Tales of Vesperia rambling shortly

Now caught up on the entire D. Gray-man anime, apparently for no reason. It wasn't as bad as I expected it to be, perhaps because I skipped approximately 30 episodes of filler. It was beautiful: there is a vast, tangential difference the moment you go from "Lenalee and Allen are investigating a nonsensical hospital drama situation for what amounts to no reason" and "Crowley goes on his first mission to a town where everyone wants to hold hands with their local akuma" to "OH MY GOD SUMAN DARK AHHHH ALLEN'S ARM HOLY CRAP".

The filler was very annoying, not least because it didn't seem to know where it was going. Like, at least three episodes of the filler were about Allen telling his backstory to everyone who would stand still long enough to listen. They actually had to make up a second traumatic backstory for him to tell Lenalee about, and it was perfectly redundant to the previous traumatic backstory he had told her about.

(I say this like I resent it, but I am not really resentful of the anime giving Allen a first boyfriend in India. I am taking that to heart, yes sir.)

I was starting to get annoyed by the signs of them cramming Allen/Lenalee implications down my throat. I think they're adorable -- as presented in the manga. That means Allen occasionally finds her flusteringly cute and she's oblivious, and they fall asleep on each other's shoulders, and not that Lenalee gets jealous and bitchy whenever Allen finds someone else pretty. And I like that despite finding her flusteringly cute, Allen doesn't seem to care one way or another about Bak stalking Lenalee, except when he can use it as blackmail material.

Anyway, I think it's really adorable, but I don't really like it as a pairing. Of course, I'm rapidly growing to have a complete disinterest in Main Male/Main Female pairings, so when I like it you know it's because it's good or sweet in a sincere way and not just because That's How It's Supposed To Happen... But I have legitimate reasons for my reservations about this particular pairing.

( Here are my reservations about Allen/Lenalee. )

A little while ago there was a secret on fandomsecrets. It stated that the anon secret-maker could never apply for a game where they used "god-modding" instead of the correct form, "god-moding".

Ever since I read that secret, it's been the same for me. It's always been a pet peeve of mine, but now it's actively more like a tic. I just can't play in your game if you don't know that it's god-mode, not god-mod. This is logically sound! God-mod does not make sense as a phrase! If the mod doesn't have godlike powers over the game, who does? Yes, an abusive mod can be a bad thing, but the phrase does not refer to abusive mods, does it? God mode, on the other hand, is a mode that overzealous players can slip into where they control other characters. Do you see how this concept works?

lern 2 english language

But it's such a stupid complaint that I'm sure I'd get laughed at if I said anything. I've had normal, intelligent people argue with me about whether or not it's god-mode or god-mod. I've seen people get really bitchy when even semantic portions of their RPs were criticized. And I'd feel bad pointing it out at every fucking RP I see, because they're all making this mistake sfdagsdf

I can't write fic for Avatar, but damn if I can't invent pairings and make them plausible in three minutes or less.

kay_willow: Okay, crack pairing formation time:
kay_willow: Sokka and Mai.
maladaptive: ....that one pains me a bit
kay_willow: Why?
maladaptive: Just. I can't imagine Sokka not punching her. XD
kay_willow: XD
kay_willow: While that would please me
maladaptive: throttling her while going "aaaaah!" in the way he does.
kay_willow: I posit in my imaginary space that he is such a relentless dork that he might make her laugh.
kay_willow: Which would make her ten times more bearable, if she displayed such a hint of humanity.
maladaptive: .....that would be awesome.
kay_willow: She could deliver the same cute lines that Zuko could ("I'm never happy.") and could beat up anyone other than her who dared make fun of him.
maladaptive: ....how do you do that. XD
maladaptive: how do you make this sound good.
maladaptive: ♥

On a bemused note, I went to a forum just for kicks and found such bashing of Zuko/Katara from not only Aang/Katara fans but also other fans that I felt like it was getting actively unfair treatment -- that I had wondered if this would be a Bleachesque pairing war, where Ichigo/Orihime is often actively derided despite just enjoying their happy corner of the internet, and I would feel morally obliged to be on the side of the nice people who were under attack.

...then I saw a Zuko/Katara fan enter the thread with such unmitigated fail ("If you don't like my pairings, I don't like you as a person!") that I promptly felt better (well, except to feel ashamed for liking her pairings, Zuko/Katara and Toph/Aang). At least it's not undeserved treatment. :D

Frankly, all the shippers are batshit. Learn to share, guys. I like both Zuko/Katara and Aang/Katara, and since all the shippers are batshit crazy, I'll just go on enjoying my happy place.

Added to my list of ingenious ideas that no one is making, such as music-playing software that allows me to make playlists via tagging, is:

A fricking LJ killer already.

Seriously, only momentum and the total suck of its competitors is keeping this place going. They have not made a good PR decision in two years or more -- every time I hear about them, my reaction is, What the fuck?

But it keeps on chugging and they never get the message because they keep getting new members. (Well, HAH, now that you can't make basic accounts anymore, that might stop.)

And the reason they keep getting new members -- the reason most people don't really leave, even though the vast majority of its users all hate LJ by now -- is because every alternative to LJ sucks.

( An overview of why every other journal site using LJ's code fails. )
What is so hard about this? Why do none of these sites follow the very basic rules of making websites? I know that it's hard to ramp up the amount of features and bandwidth LJ has, but -- how do you all fail this badly? There are only a few things I demand in my journal website:

--Search function. This is important.
--Not hideous; neat.
--Let me find things; usable.
--No stupid fucking theme. I am a user, not an inmate, and you are a website, not a morgue.
--Give me the ability to pay you to get a fricking ton of userpics.

If you do all of these things, you will have created a simple, professional service that can devour LJ's no-longer-loyal userbase and generate the bucks for you. I pay LJ and I think they're assholes.

The big problem, for me, is that I am extremely reluctant to move because I am in this journal thing for the community, not the exercise in writing. I have an LJ because there are communities for my fandoms and interests where people post routinely and share their thoughts and fanworks and discuss things that are on their mind; from these forums I make friends and create a social network. And so far none of these rival-wannabes have anything like cohesive communities, and so I will never join them.

The key to getting a community is to stop alienating people. Don't isolate your users by not letting them search for other users or communities. Don't be so ugly or unintuitive that no one can look at/bear to use your site. Don't call your users names or insult their intelligence or jeer at them with stupid omnipresent mascots. Let people have a variety of userpics right off the bat and you'll own the RP crowd.

Then people will join your site. And maybe you'll get a community. And maybe I'll join.

I swear, if I had any business sense, I'd make a fortune... A, anyone wanna help?? D:

I'm not sure what to make of the Peony Gaiden. I read it and it doesn't quite jive with what I understand to be canon and/or logical, and then it doesn't help that the romantic-centric plot could've been dreamed up by a preteen girl. (Which is so strange, it's so utterly different than the intrigue and characterization at work in the Asch and Ion Gaidens.)

( Timeline and adoption. )

Well, for my part, I'm going to take the gist of it -- tragic romance -- and I'll bring that to my own RP as Peony. (Although man, he was kind of a dick back then. It was all very romantic, but he was still kind of a dick! I'm glad he got over himself.) But I'm definitely not taking the specifics. XD